According To Hoyt

This post will seem to be about translation. It’s not. This is a metaphor. The post is a continuation of yesterday’s on writing minority view points: who should do it, how it should be done, and why the establishment gets it wrong, of course. (Also on whether there is some special virtue in doing it. And on who wants to read this.)

The discussion here and at Mad Genius Club yesterday reminded me of when I was sixteen and embarked on a class called “Techniques of Translation.”

Although I had studied French and English and German, the translations I’d done so far were of the “I took the pen of my neighbor” variety. I thought the class would teach me to smooth out the sentence to “I took my neighbor’s pen” and that would be that.

I was wrong. Oh, it taught that also, but that was a minor portion of it. The class mostly hinged on the moral, ethical and – most of all – professional dilemmas of being a translator. I know any number of you are translators, formal or informal, but any number of you are also not. So, for the ones who are not, let me break the news with my usual gentleness:

There is no such thing as translation.

The French have a proverb “to translate is to betray a little” – or at least that’s the closest meaning in English. It’s fairly close to the true meaning, but slightly askew, of course. Every language is slightly askew to other languages.

The idea that there exists in every language a word that is exactly the equivalent of other languages is sort of like assuming that aliens will – of course – live in houses, go to school, ride buses, understand Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Language is how we organize our thoughts, and each word, no matter how simple, carries with it the cultural freight and experience of the specific language. Oh, “mother” will generally mean “the one who gave birth to” – except for some tribal, insular cultures where it might mean “the one who calls me by her name” or “my father’s principal wife” – but the “feel” behind it will be different, depending on the images associated with “mother” in the culture.

So, when you translate, you’re actually performing a function as a bridge. Translation is not the straightforward affair it seems to be but a dialogue between the original language and the language you translate into. If you’re lucky, you meet halfway. Sometimes that’s not possible, and you feel really guilty about “lying” to the people receiving the translation. When on top of language you need to integrate different cultures and living systems (which you do when translating anything even an ad) you feel even more guilty, because you’re going to betray, no matter how much you try. At one point, a while back, I had my dad on one phone, my husband on the other, and I was doing rapid-fire translation about a relatively straight forward matter. And even that caused me pangs in conscience, because my dad simply doesn’t understand how things are done here. I had to approach his experience and explain our experience in a way he wouldn’t think I was insane or explaining badly. That meant a thousand minor lies.

Okay – now, what does that have to do with yesterday’s topic?

I am, as I tried to point out, a woman who grew up in a different culture. I am American – please don’t dispute it – because one of the wonders about America is that it doesn’t matter where you came from, you can be one of us. However, my past is Portuguese.

Portugal is one of those odd countries, about which most people know nothing while thinking they know a lot. Nine out of ten people think it’s in South America. Heck, a Yale liberal arts graduate once ARGUED with me about this. An international operator once informed me that it was a city in Spain.

People tell me we have ancient wisdom; that we’re standard white westerners; that we’re Hispanic (closer, at least when it comes to our experience in America because most of us ON SIGHT look Hispanic); that we’re passionate and hot blooded; that we’re (at least women) repressed and obedient, and a lot of other things I DON’T KNOW. I don’t know because it’s impossible for me to know, because a) everyone seems to have a different stereotype of what “Portuguese” means and b) because people assume I am this, without telling me.

Portugal is, in fact, obscure enough to be used for “hot strange minority” in comedies or “exotic place” in TV dramas. The way it’s used (a “swinger” couple in Friends, really?) usually makes me laugh my head off.

So right now, those of you who think that literature needs more minority view points or whatever are going “but, that’s exactly what we mean. Why don’t you write your amazingly different culture and enlighten us?” Oh, you’re so lucky you’re faraway enough I can’t hit you with a dictionary.

I’ve been taken to task on this blog before for not writing “about Portugal’s 900 years of history” instead of stuff set in Tudor England. (Portugal is very proud of 900 years of history, which reminds me of Heinlein’s dictum on people who are proud of their ancestry. Never mind.)

So, Chilluns, gather around and let me tell you a story. Imagine a Sarah newly deplaned from Portugal. I knew next to nothing about the US. I’d come here to do my 12^th grade, so I sort of kind of knew what it was like to be a senior in high school. Sort of and kind of, because of course exchange students are a species apart. Even that was four years in the past, as I left after my exchange student year, went back, finished my degree, then married the nice boy who’d lived down the road from me in Ohio, thereby managing the feat of marrying the boy next door across the ocean, which is par for the course for my weirdness.

I wanted to write, of course. I particularly wanted to write because for the first time in my life I was living with someone – my husband – who not only didn’t disapprove of it, but encouraged it. On novelty alone, I wanted to write.

The problem is you can’t always write aliens. You can’t always write fairies. And I didn’t feel qualified to write Americans. And there’s only so many people without a past you can write. (I was hit over the head, I swear. I remember nothing but two minutes in the past.)

I decided to do the sensible thing and write stories set in Portugal and/or with Portuguese characters. It did not go WELL.

The BEST response I got (it was personal!) was a rejection informing me I was a narrowminded pain, who clearly had never been outside the US (this, btw, for a story I didn’t think was in ANY WAY critical of Portugal. Yeah, there are things that drive me nuts about the place, but I also love many of those things. Kind of like you’ll love the way your kid always looks scruffy. I thought that was clear in the story. The thing this person objected to? The fact that no one refrigerated anything and the fact that TO THEM the place sounded icky.)

It was that rejection that opened my eyes. I realized I was up against the “betraying a little” dilemma again. It wasn’t going to be as easy as writing WELL about Portugal. If I wanted to write about Portugal, I had to choose my lies carefully, but I was going to HAVE to lie. Or write non-fiction, dry as dust and twice as boring.

That is, to write about Portugal, I had to know enough about the US to know at least what was LIKELY to be in the editor’s head when the word Portugal was said. I had to know what they expected. This wasn’t as easy as say your picture of Australia (Crocks and big knives) because Portugal is not that well (mis)known. More importantly, I needed to know what people wanted to get out of reading about Portugal. Did they want to experience the exotic, in which case I should emphasize that? Did they want a sense of history, in which case I should push that? Or did they want the feeling that they were enlightened and kind for reading about this small, barely second world country, in which case I should emphasize the victimhood and struggle? What did they want?

It was a hopeless case. I realized I couldn’t cram the whole organic culture as I’d known it in there. I couldn’t even put in the warts (because Portugal is a small country, even if I come from there, if I put in the warts, publishers will perceive it as bullying and myself as a “narrow minded pain.”) Worse, I didn’t know what they thought were warts (what? Really? Lack of refrigeration? Mankind lived for millennia without it, you know?)

Worse, at best anything I wrote about Portugal to be halfway accurate would need to be between whatever Americans could accept (exotic, Latin, etc.) and the truth and I didn’t know America enough to get there. It was like trying to translate when all you know is classroom language on one side. You can’t do it.

So I gave up on that and wrote historical (mostly Rome and England because there the stereotypes I had weren’t that far off) and eventually became comfortable enough to write American characters.

I think at this point I could write Portuguese set/Portuguese characters. I’m accultured enough to reach Americans I THINK.

The problem is, I don’t really want to. We come up against those moral and ethical dilemmas again and it makes writing SUCH a pain.

First, we come up on the reason I moved here at all: I always felt like a stranger in a strange land. Part of this was me. Part of it, though, is that my family – I’m reminded of this every time I go back – is odd. Oh, not in any bad way, but I continuously meet other Portuguese who assume they know how… my family interacts; what I was taught at home; what we ate; what we believed. They’re wrong on almost every count. And the weird thing is they’d be right for ALMOST every Portuguese of my class, age, and upbringing at least as far as I can tell. I’ve come to the conclusion my family (and to an extent the village I grew up in) is just a bunch of outliers. Which explains why going to friends’ houses for vacation was like being an exchange student. No, I don’t know why or how this happened, but I know if I portray “real Portuguese” it will feel profoundly weird to me.

Second: Most Portuguese in the US – for the few people who actually KNOW Portuguese people – come from the Islands (Azores and Madeira) which makes them about as much like me (from the North of the continent) as a native of NYC is like a native of the deep south. No. Less so. In the states, you’re more likely to have had schooling rituals (prom/homecoming, etc) and chain stores in common.

Third: I have been away from Portugal for twenty five years, save for brief visits. In that time everything has changed, perhaps more so than in most places, due to integration into EEC, huge immigration from Eastern Europe, etc. I SIMPLY don’t know how things work now. Even the schooling system seems to have been reinvented from the ground up. There are a LOT of private universities, for instance, while in my day there were two and they weren’t taken seriously. There are also more grades and arranged differently. People’s shopping has rearranged with the introduction of supermarkets and not always in ways I understand. And NONE of it makes sense to me. For instance, my parents’ house was near a train stop. Not a station. Usually not listed in anything, just a place on the line where the train stopped. You could get in and get your ticket onboard from the conductor. Over the last twenty five years, the “stop” has acquired shelters, clocks and announcements. Also graffiti and loiterers. Okay fine. But this time, when I went back, I found out you now have automated machines where… you get a ticket to get a ticket on the train. Yes, that’s right. You buy a ticket from the machine, which allows you to buy a ticket on the train. Why? I don’t know. My mother couldn’t explain it, and the stuff on the machine made no sense. Even HOW to do it made no sense. My parents have started using the bus, which is more uncomfortable and takes longer, simply because they don’t get HOW to do it. I’m sure there’s a reason for this double-blind ticket purchase other than the Portuguese love for bureaucracy. Or maybe there isn’t. BUT I don’t know. And that’s a minor example.

I realized I knew nothing of Portugal when my husband, my kids and I found ourselves in a sizeable village at lunch time, starving, and I couldn’t figure out WHERE to buy food. (In villages it’s not necessarily marked, and besides you can buy food at any of the following: grocery stores; restaurants; taverns; coffee shops; improvised for-the-season cafes. Or all of those might NOT serve food. The ones I found I couldn’t determine if they did, and had no idea how to ask.)

I know you don’t believe that last, and that’s an example of why it’s hard for me to write about Portugal – because I don’t know what’s in your head and now half the time I don’t know what’s in Portugal, either.

So, to pull it all back – insistence that minorities only must be allowed to write minorities MIGHT seem like it makes sense. Kind of like translating “I got my son’s pen” makes sense. They know how their culture/lifestyle works, so of course they’d write it better.

But it’s NOT like writing it. It’s not an account. Because novels are – at least supposed to be – entertaining, it’s more like translating. What you write must not only be accurate. It must sound accurate to the reader. The two are antithetical. So at best it’s a compromise and a small betrayal.

Are minorities/foreigners/etc. capable of doing this? Of course. As I said, I think at this point I am at least for short stories (not sure about trying a novel.) But can they do it better than a non-native/non minority who studies it really well and writes about it?

Well… yes. No. Maybe. It depends on the individual writing and how willing they are to take out their own experiences, unpack them, and then betray them a little to match what’s in the reader’s head, so they can make sense of it all.

Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from the US – great regional variation, for instance (coming from the fact that it’s only in the last twenty years that they’ve started defeating tribalism, and that not well. Not real tribes, but the different regions ARE different ethnicities.) Also no one has written a “Daily Life In Portugal” – though there is a “Daily Life in Medieval Portugal” which I haven’t read, though I’ve bought it. Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from Portugal, too. I had trouble finding a good, comprehensive history when I visited. And because their distribution of books is insane (the concept of back list was alien when I was growing up at least) and there’s no amazon.pt, it’s very difficult to get history (or other) books on specific narrow topics. You might go to the story looking for an history of Roman Portugal, but what’s on the shelves right then is an history of Port Wine; an history of Celtic Portugal; and an history of shoe laces.

However, I think I’d at least consider reading the book if someone were dedicated enough to wade in and read all the books (many of them in Portuguese) you can read to get the complete-enough picture to write about Portugal and did it without either condescension or too much clean up (Portugal… well, dears, let’s just say when I was growing up there we considered Italians and Greeks organized. And Ireland has almost Germanic precision as far as we were concerned. And we were PROUD of this. We should be. Looking from the outside it’s a minor miracle anything works enough to keep up a technological society to the extent it exists. BUT I understand this – it must be genetic because not only do I fight it every day, but so do my kids. HOWEVER most people would, I think, clean most of it away) and without implying Portuguese are victims because they live in less materially comfortable circumstances (and have a guaranteed month of vacation in Summer, a week at Easter and Christmas, plus the most holidays of any country in Europe.)

Do I hunger for such a book? To be blunt, no. I worry that the betrayals made would spin the book even further away from my admittedly odd experience. I worry I would for the rest of my life be meeting people who go “Oh, you’re Portuguese, so you’re exactly like…” (I wonder if Greeks feel that way about “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”)

I prefer to read about interesting people, no matter where they come from. Oh, I’ll give a try to the exotic, if simply because it’s a change of pace. Stuff set in rural South Africa for instance. And I absolutely ADORED Paul Mann’s Indian mysteries, one of those series I don’t think lasted long enough.

HOWEVER if I start a book set somewhere and it’s all about “victimhood” it goes against the wall so hard it leaves marks. Oh, sure, some people have it really tough (Paul Mann’s description of the underclass in India was responsible for my donating more than I should to various charities) but for books to be entertaining they can’t just be about oppression and misery and taking it. Good authors get over plotting by dropping walls on character. And most readers don’t view fiction reading as an exercise in self flagellation where you must suffer to understand how bad other people’s circumstances are.

And when I say I’d read about exotic locales, those can be in Europe, too. Small town England in the present day would be fascinating. (The latest I’ve read set there was Agatha Christie.) It has nothing to do with stealing victimhood, only with me being an SF geek, forever looking for the alien – even when I’m aware it’s “translated” and “betrayed.”

So, that is the ultimate conclusion: I’d be willing to read anything, written by anyone, as long as it’s interesting. I don’t want to read about people “like me” and I’m not angry there aren’t more of us as characters. (One of my characters has a series about a woman with my background. I don’t want to know. No, seriously. I’d have to kill him in a horrible way. And don’t say “what do you mean one of your characters has…” Any explanation would land one of us in the loony bin.) I don’t object to reading about people like me, though, if done in a way I find entertaining. And I don’t care about the background of the author, provided he/she can write the story convincingly.

Exciting, uh? Aren’t you amazed? I know I am. That this is shocking to the establishment explains why they’re in trouble.

A couple of years ago, a male friend who wrote from a female POV got back a letter telling him this was unethical. Not just bad writing, mind – which knowing my friend it wouldn’t be – but wrong on a moral level. He couldn’t write women, because he wasn’t one.

This worried me because I’m one of those writers who writes preferentially as the opposite gender. There have always been half a dozen of them (Heinlein was about even) and in my case, when I started writing, I just didn’t feel comfortable writing as a woman. Part of this was that I was raised to be a tomboy and, having attended an all girls’ school for five years, know that I’m not only NOT a typical female, I have no clue how typical females work. But on top of that, I didn’t know how AMERICAN females worked. (Yes, they’re more different than males. Partly, I think because women are more “creatures of the group” by evolutionary design.)

However, when I looked further into this, I found out that the problem was not writing something you’re not – phew! Those of us who have written aliens ARE grateful – but this thing called “stealing victimhood.” You’re not supposed to write anyone who can be considered down the totem pole from you and “victims of society.” Yes, yes, for this they use the whole Marxist thought thing which, as you know, makes my teeth hurt (as the fangs come out.)

But let’s forget that for a moment, because if I start beating up on Marx I’ll be here all day and I have a book to finish.

Let’s just assume that they are right and that there is inherent “victimhood” in being female, “of color” (as opposed to those translucent people you see all around. Total yucko, them. Also, they get run over all the time because people can’t see them), gay or handicapped.

Okay, so there’s “victimhood”. And? What do they mean “stealing victimhood?” Is it points in a game that you collect and can convert into cash?

My dears, I know that it doesn’t make sense, but yes, in their minds – which means the minds of many recent college graduates, editors included – YES. Yes, there’s inherent value in being a victim. Yes, this will convert into mountains of cash.

Take a deep breath. What this means is that … Yes, yes, indeed… These people BUY BOOKS because of that. And I don’t mean just for their private consumption, but for selling to other people.

Now think about it, boys, girls and dragons, when IS the last time you picked up a book in the store or downloaded a sample from Amazon, for that matter and went “This book is about a deaf pacific islander lesbian! It’s a total buy!” Right. Unless for some reason I’m interested about the life of deaf pacific islander lesbians at THAT moment, then the book better have a lot more to recommend it. I suspect most people are the same.

Except possibly editors and glitterati. The books my kids are forced to read for school, which are a fair sample of what the “intellectuals” consider good are often exactly like that “oppressed minority gets oppress” IS the book.

And the fact they think that “victimhood” is something to steal just about tells you why the publishing houses are almost all scrambling on the verge of bankruptcy.

Look, kiddies, if I want to experience someone who gets victimized I can look at being a writer struggling to survive while everyone has their hand in your pocket. Only that’s not likely to be bought and would probably confuse the readers who know we’re all rich.

I write characters of all colors, including some that don’t exist in reality. I write characters of all sexual orientations, including some that don’t exist in reality (dragons turn them on. No, really. Um… I should release that story for kindle), I write characters from every possible origin and of some impossible genders (shape changing/gender changing elf.)

What I DO NOT write are victims. Oh, some of my characters are up against huge obstacles and some of them get crushed in the end, but they go down swinging. (Not usually that type of swinging, no. I get bored writing it, guys. Sorry.) If they lose, they lose with fists balled and yelling defiance to the world.

Why? Because I have no time for victims. And I PARTICULARLY, STRONGLY despise people who think being born something like woman or melanin enhanced or gay makes you a victim. It’s funny, but none of my friends in that situation feel that way. Oh, they’re sometimes annoyed at the way people behave to them – like, who isn’t? – but that’s part of being human. None of them lies down groaning and muttering “oh, the injustice.”

So, I’ll continue writing whatever and whomever I d*mn well please. If I do it badly, you can stomp me. But you CANNOT accuse me of “stealing victimhood.”

I didn’t do it, guv. Ain’t taken no victimhood. You won’t find it anywhere on me.

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

Some days it’s hardly worth getting out of bed. I woke up feeling icky and sluggish. Yes, I realize this is probably part of the adjustment to altitude and time change. But then it’s been one long morning of being nibbled by ducks. Admnistrivia is the curse of the writer without a full time assistant.

I swear I had some interesting – I think? – thoughts around here somewhere. If only I can find them. They might very well have slipped through the cracks on the floor.

I want to write but right now all my body feels like doing is curling up and vegetating. I’m going to go for a walk, and hopefully it will reset my body so I can work.

Sorry. Hopefully I’ll be “on” tomorrow. Meanwhile there’s a new shape shifter/vampire collection of mine out from Naked Reader. The title story, Blood Ransom is the most recent one, and is in the worldbuilding for the “present day” vampire world – the continuum of the Musketeers vampire stories. I’m calling that world Blood Worlds mostly because it’s obvious.  http://nakedreader.com/

Oh, yeah, and my son has more Ninja Nun out.

And now I’m goign to walk.  If you find my mind in your desk drawers or something, send it back.  I’ll pay postage.

This is a compilation of how the ebook front looks to me at the moment. Things might look completely different to the next person over, particularly if the next person over knows more about publishing than I do (which isn’t as easy as it used to be, but is also not impossible.) I thought it might interest those of you who are on the outside or not professionally involved in the field.

First let me tell you that a lot of the stuff you hear about ebooks and how everyone is reading ebooks is just pie in the sky. It is talk that is familiar to me – and has been for a while – because ebooks have been talked about in every possible venue (and some impossible ones) for the about twenty years I’ve been paying attention to the market.

Long before I sold my very first short story – heck, long before I sent it out – I was attending conferences in which some minor agent or editor solemnly informed us that the coming thing was ebooks and it would upend all of publishing. Or else that the coming thing was novels with active content.

It went on for so long, in fact, that everyone – this included, I think, most of the NY publishing establishment – gave up on it and decided ebooks were a lie. I started hearing theories on why they’d never come: book readers are inherently more conservative than game players; books on paper are a sensuous experience – etc.

Of course now things are different. Now we have Amanda Hocking and such, surprise bestsellers created by epublishing.

But are things different? Really? There have always been “self published bestsellers”, what we used to call “books from the back of the van.” Look up The Celestine Prophecy. Twelve years ago I attended the Pikes Peak Writers conference and – as an unpublished author – was told my best shot was to publish my own book, “with a nice cover” and then send it that way to the publishers, who were then more likely to buy it. “Particularly if you’ve hand-sold 500 copies or so yourself.” Was this true? I don’t know. Just as I don’t know if Dean Wesley Smith’s advice that I do a POD of a book, then send it to editors with a specific letter on what rights I’m willing to sell would work. It might. Or it might not. It SHOULD. But… are we there yet?

Gut feeling? No. We’re not there yet. I think we’ll be. I do think there’s a future for writing and for writers. Whether there will be a lost generation first, that’s something I can’t answer. I will give, though, as a shred of hope, the fact that this whole thing is moving much faster than I expected. OTOH keep in mind it’s moving much slower than industry insiders expected twenty years ago.

So, here’s a snapshot of the battle as I see it right now. Remember, in a large battle all a foot soldier can see is the area around herself. Over a few dozen feet it might be completely different.

Here’s what I see – through the email lists I belong to, through reading articles and gleaning numbers from whispered comments – most writers aren’t making a living from their own ebooks yet. In fact, all the way from high mid list to raw beginner, the numbers are startlingly consistent and run in the mid hundreds at best – or about 10% even the suckiest publisher printrun.

This is for fiction and specifically for genre fiction. It’s entirely possible that it’s completely different for non fiction and how to books. I wouldn’t know.

It’s possible the reason for this is that – by publisher choice of what to publish – genre readership has been graying. They are now at best late middle age, a time when people don’t adopt technology very fast. But the graying of the readership was a problem before ebooks, and one we’ll have to contend with anyway.

The fact that romance is the one genre bucking this trend – they sell much better in ebooks, sometimes amazingly well – would indicate this hypothesis is correct, as romance has the least gray readership.

However, these numbers, small though they are, have the industry in a tailspin. How much they’d have been in a tailspin anyway, and are simply using this to cover up their issues, I don’t know. The industry is opaque, autocratic and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere not only cut itself off from market signals, but considered this cutting off a good thing. (Economics, they iz doing it wrong.)

I’ll note in passing that Baen is having a banner year, despite some glitches with their conference, and despite the fact their ebooks aren’t available on Amazon. They do, otoh, try to stay in touch with their audience and publish what the readers want.

So for the midlister like myself the choice is scant. On the one hand the publishing industry which gave us ulcers seems to be imploding. Yay. OTOH it is no longer providing the contracts it once did and which kept us alive at least at a subsistence level. Uh Oh. On the one hand various things coming out seem to indicate that our readership really was always larger than they said. Yay. OTOH that readership doesn’t seem to be present in ebooks. The dame or the tiger. Choose, but choose now.

I’m not quite in that boat. For one I work for Baen (Yay) for another I’ve got contracts between Baen and other companies to be very busy for another year and a half (Yay) at almost my normal income (Yay.) On the other hand, a book turned in to a company not Baen three months ago has yet to be accepted/scheduled, and I have no clue what is going on since the editor is not answering me. (Uh Oh.) And payments seem to come later and later (very uh oh, and the reason – watch this space – there will be a “subscribe to Sarah” program.)

But I’m still in that boat, as I look further ahead. I have no reason to believe my relationship with Baen won’t continue. However, as per Laurell K. Hamilton (thanks Laurell) one shouldn’t work for a single publisher. Security and sanity demand spreading out the risk. Also, to be blunt, I write mystery too and the sort of dark fantasy Baen is not a good outlet for.

So, the Titanic is sinking, but I’m floating atop the grand piano.

It is my belief that as books collapse more – and they seem to be – ebooks can’t help but rise. Market abhors a vaccum. (Except Dyson.)

Because of economies of scale, I see no reason that ebooks can’t support writers. As more people self-publish it will become obvious it is NOT as widespread an ability as most people think (look at most slush piles) and also that more people are willing to read more, if their tastes – not the distributors – are catered to. It’s an underserved market.

But writers might need to write more – which I can probably do, once I’m past this tight spot of contracted books and books I really want to do for Baen and that I’m fairly sure Toni will take. I mean, I can write six books a year. Have done it. And I suspect Baen can’t take all of them, not unless this next book sells beyond all expectations and not unless Toni takes an interest in mystery or vampires (and not just to set them on fire, as per Larry Correia, though his methods are great too.)

I think writing will become as it once was, in the hallowed days of pulp. The book itself doesn’t make much money, but it stays in print forever and once you have a back list it will feed you comfortably.

Will it become that in time for me to have a healthy career? Who knows. All I know I that the field as it existed has exploded. You can’t put humpty dumpty together again.

All births are messy. All births involve blood and pain and the possibility of death for both parent and child. The solution, though, is not to try to keep the child in the womb till college (which is what some of the main stream presses seem to be betting on.) Once labor starts it has to progress. And once a baby is in there, it will have to come out (a realization that gave me the horrors five months into my first pregnancy.)

So I see nothing for it but put my shoulder under the load and heave up. Even if I’m afraid to end up as the Fallen Caryatid.

In the end it helps to remember that publishing wasn’t pushed. It threw itself down the cliff. And it is only the appearance of ebooks that allows most writers today to have hope of making a decent living someday.

All the Port Wine made it through.  The bags are semi-unpacked, their contents distributed into stacks.  I must find out if I still have furniture under the dust and cat fuzz.  Then I need to get back to work.  I hear there are people waiting for the next Darkship…

Every time I come back to Portugal I catch up on who has married/had children/divorced/died since I left. At this point the list of survivors is smaller than the list of those on the other side.

This is, of course, true of everyone. We are born to a world of adults and as we age, they age also, and die. The problem is the distance and the fact I only come back every few years.

It is a problem because the minute I get on the plane I forget all the changes. Look, it makes perfect sense. After all my mind is used to the village as it was, a place where it spent close to twenty five years. It’s much easier to return there than to the little snatches it gets for one to two weeks every few years. So every time I come back I find myself, at the back of my mind expecting to see my grandmother and to visit the places of my childhood. My grandmother is of course long dead and those places covered in cement.

What I get are slices of life that amount to one of those mainstream novels where you see people age, and the family line die out.

Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother’s best friends, who lived across the street most of my childhood and kept one of two general stores in the village, would be heartbroken to find their family line has died out without descendants, leaving their sprawling house and old garden empty and shuttered the moss-covered walls covered with “for sale” signs. Would they still have engaged as vigorously in the life of the village, sold peanuts and candy to the village children and helped build the giant bonfire every summer Solestice? Would they have worked quite so hard? Would they be sad to see their home closed and falling to ruin?

Is it a mercy they don’t know, or could they have changed their life course if they did?

These stories happen around us all the time, I know. It only affects me more because of distance, of seeing it suddenly again, and of that childhood that no one who is part of my day to day life remembers and of which these people were such an integral part. It is a question as old as time. If we could look into the future, what would we change today? And would it be good or bad?

Stories have been written about this, and I can’t add to them, or change them. I can only feel a vague melancholy about this being human thing and all its limitations.

 

I am, of course, for progress. Progress, understood as what makes human life easier or even more pleasant.

I have some doubts, though, about to what extent the place where I grew up has progressed or just become more unpleasant.

I cannot remember this place – not from growing up here.

Things have changed beyond recognition. It started with the highway that bisected the main road of the village in two, and in that way took out the heart of the village. Then, as the city of Porto grew to engulf it, the village bristled with stack-a-prole apartments. You find them in any country that has succumbed to socialism, particularly in the Eastern European countries – graceless and featureless concrete boxes, stacked one on the other, with perhaps the nominal balcony where the householder can allow his children to catch a gulp of non-recycled air.

Old Portuguese houses, even the very large ones built as apartments, have a certain Mediterranean charm adorned with red tile roofs and often graced with curving balconies or other small notes that lend the whole indescribable charm.

But at a certain point – I remember it – featureless concrete apartment blocks were the future, and that’s where these people wanted to go and where they hurried, after I left to the States. (I don’t want to imply I would have stopped it had I been here, but who knows. It is my considered opinion that not much can stop a determined woman with an opinion. Tanks and bulldozers tremble before a woman with her hands at her waist and an expression of sullen determination.) These apartment blocks are everywhere, facing other apartment blocks, with only the occasional park here and there, with maybe a dozen stunted trees.

I remember growing up in the village and spending time exploring the abandoned Roman gold mines amid the pine forests. Now the pine forests themselves have disappeared and the mines are, presumably, buried under these “developments.” I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like to be a kid in one of these apartment blocks.

They’ll find it natural, I suppose. And probably they have tons of little friends and lead lives quite unlike my lonely childhood. But I suspect they have less freedom and their visual landscape is far empoverished.

The new schools, set amid parks, are graceless brick boxes surrounded by chain link fence, looking more like minimum security prisons than like institutions of learning. Nothing like the old, whitewashed village school with one room for girls and one for boys.

I know you’ll say – or you would if you studied the matter – that nowadays, at least, these children have bathrooms in the home and are generally cleaner and better fed than we were. I realize it is probably stupid of me to feel the aesthetic impoverishment they suffer is worse than being food-deprived or dirty.

I read enough stories of people growing up in NYC in the early twentieth century to know one can learn to love an arid cityscape – even as a small child. But these apartment blocks are not set in the center of strongly linked neighborhoods nor are they even as well built as early twentieth century apartments, and I can’t help but wonder if the sterile surroundings impoverish the mind, the soul and the imagination.

Perhaps I’m just an old woman lamenting the passing of her childhood landscapes. It seems particularly pointless to me, since Portuguese population is not even growing. Instead, the villages and interlands are becoming depopulated while the city burgeons with rootless people.

I’d give quite a bit to walk again the streets of the old village where we knew everyone, but barring time travel that is impossible.

So I take my son down the old trails, and get lost, then find my way again as I trace it by a bit of an abandoned house, the ruined wall of a field where I once played.

You can’t go home again. At best, you can go to what remains of it, and trace it amid the present looking for bits of the past, like a blind man trying to read the faint impressions of print on a page designed for those who can see.

If you go home, you’re liable to find that not only do you not belong there anymore, but it too does not belong to you. Perhaps it never did.

Crossposted at Classical Values

 

It is well known I have a fear of flying, which I’m doing today – though the rest of week is “canned” posts from Portugal, since I’m not getting home till Saturday (my husband and I having decided we need a little time before I must deal with house and cats.)

What I’ve probably never explained is what that fear consists of. It’s not so much a fear of falling – that is there, too, of course. I mean, it is a possibility, as is a bomb or terrorist attack. But what I’m most scared of is the loss of control I experience while flying. I’d not feel much different if I were taking a long distance train (which I did, a lot, in my younger days) or bus.

It will perhaps surprise a lot of people that I am a control freak. In my defense I am a control freak of a peculiar and localized kind. I couldn’t care less what other people do, for instance, or if they do things in the “one way I approve of.” Once my kids reached the age of being self-propelled and fairly reasonable, provided they behave like human beings, do their share of chores and do well at school, I couldn’t care less if in their own private time they choose to sleep crosswise on the bed or scratch their ear with their big toe. If their rooms are relatively clean (no rotting food, no trash on the floor and no bugs) I don’t even much care how they arrange their furniture or what they choose to display on their shelves. Ditto the way they dress. Many people at conventions seem to believe I make them wear button downs. Frankly I’d prefer they wear t-shirts as they don’t need ironing. But they like button downs and the inconvenience to me is minimal, so that’s fine. In fact, some people would call me rather slapdash when it comes to controlling my family. I never even consider controlling my friends – though I reserve the right to argue with or tease them about their choices.

So in what way am I a control freak? Me. I like to control me, my immediate surroundings and my decisions. I have never done drugs, because I like to be in control of my own mind. Illnesses annoy me (as did the excessive weight I’ve struggled with) because, curse it all, I should be able to control m own body. I don’t like roller coasters because I can’t control the way they roll. When I was very little, I used to pull my own milk teeth, as opposed to letting an adult pull them with string or otherwise, because I preferred to control the pain. Frankly, still, if I must do something which will hurt or be unpleasant, I’d rather do it to myself.

Because of this I prefer to drive myself, though I seem to have accepted my husband and son as extensions of the self (probably because I can nag them.)

Airplane travel, particularly when involving three plane changes, has way too much control in other people’s hands, particularly in the time of National Security issues. I can’t even get up when the air hostess would rather I sat down, even if I have a very, very good reason, such as a poisonous lizard down my pants. (How would I know how a poisonous lizard got on the plane? It could!)

On top of that there’s other considerations. The bureaucracy involved is mind boggling. For instance, the computers of Usairways and TAP don’t talk to each other, and since I’m leaving (have left, by the time you read this) Porto headed for Lisbon on a TAP plane, I have a boarding pass only for the first flight, after which I must navigate a strange airport (trust me, being from the North, I find Lisbon VERY strange) and get boarding passes for the next two flights, all in about an hour and a half (so cross fingers the plane is not late.) Once I’ve landed for my connection in the states (should be close if not already there by the time this post goes up) I will feel better, since I have a measure of control: even if planes are grounded, I can rent a car and drive home to Colorado. Mind you, I’ll hate it like poison, but not as much as I’d hate being stranded away from my husband.

So, send kind thoughts my way, that today’s travels go well. It always seems to be that the travel to Portugal is fraught, but the travel back is glitch-less. (Except for their losing my bags occasionally, though even that not often.) Let’s hope this holds.

I miss home, I miss my husband, I miss my cats, I miss my friends; I miss diners and having access to the internet when I feel like it; I miss my office and my keyboard and my coffee maker; I miss my walks around the neighborhood and the way th light slants through the trees in the park; I miss my treadmill; I miss my art desk; I miss the Natu… wait Denver Museum of Nature and Science; I miss the aquarium, the zoo and the Denver Museum of Art.

I guess sometimes you need to travel half around the world to find out you’re a homebody after all.

 

I was reading a book about pre-historic Indo-European cultures – actually a book about paleo-linguistics – which described, as an important part of the indo-European culture, the giving of large banquets in which long poems praising the feast-giver were recited and conferred status both upon the reciter and the feast-giver.

I suspect though of course there is no way to prove it, that elements of these have survived in sagas like the Iliad and the Odyssey. And perhaps it is because Western culture is descended from those early horse riders possibly from the Steppes (there are other hypothesis) that our literature is the form it is.

It doesn’t take a more arcane activity than watching Anime or reading Manga to understand that the literary tradition in Asian countries, venerable and well developed though it is, doesn’t tend to follow the same framework as ours. As for other lands, particularly those that were not literate when they first came in contact with Europeans, their stories can seem almost alien to us.

It’s not that telling stories is a mark of civilization – it is not, to paraphrase Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, any savage can tell stories – but that the stories we tell both are molded by and mold us into what we are.

The shift in interest from science fiction to fantasy seems to have come at a time when we moved out of what could be called the “steam punk civilization” – which wasn’t, of course, as it lasted well into the late fifties – where someone who was smart enough could master the principles of a scientific trade at home with books and determination. Instead, we were faced with a civilization that, to the average person, might as well be magic. Curiously, fantasy was most popular amid the people who should by rights know how to assemble a computer from scratch (and many of whom did.) Possibly because to assemble a computer we already need sophisticated components, which are, in themselves a form of “magic.”

Myself I think we need more science fiction, and have thought so for a while. And while I don’t object to hard science fiction that explains the insides of machines and how they work, (I enjoy it, if I’m in the mood for it) I think mostly we need science fiction that explains how society changes under technological impact, and by doing so prepares us for that change.

Look, when cloning happened it was a non-event for the science fiction reading public, even as it was a nine-day wonder to those who had never read science fiction. And the idea, so odd it amounted to nothing less than the possibility of reproducing humans without sex, left people who were prepared completely rational and able to cope with the situation. Meanwhile the non readers were having nightmares.

We’re changing now even faster than I expect and I think we need more and better science fiction to prepare people. Like those early sagas, this could prepare our civilization and make it strong and supple for the fast change ahead, giving civilization to withstand pressures that might otherwise break it.

The difficulty has been, for a long time, that publishers thought science fiction doesn’t sell. A certain type doesn’t, of course and it could be argued it’s the type they themselves favor. To sell any story has to be entertaining.

But in the fraught times ahead, I think we need science fiction writers skilled enough to attract the reading public back to the idea that a fast changing world can be wondrous rather than traumatic.

It is of course entirely possible I’m barking up the wrong tree…

Crossposted at Mad Genius Club

Returning to Portugal for a visit has both the effect of skipping forward and watching only the high points of a movie (I’ve now reached the rueful age when I can ask my mother “tell me which of my elementary school classmates died since I’ve last been here) and the effect of re-examining my childhood by viewing it as an adult and an outsider.

To an extent I suspect I was always an outsider. Like many of my SF/F writing and reading breathren I was a stranger in a strange land, forever moving amid familiar landscapes that might be dear but didn’t become any more understandable for knowing them very well.

But now I am faced with various things that would probably never have come to mind had I stayed and lived here – things like, now that I visit as my own sons are almost grown – realizing that things I viewed as imutable and the laws of the Persians and Medes, were not only not “family traditions” as something my parents decided to do and continued doing because they liked them, but also that they have not continued once I – the youngest child by 9 years – was out of the house.

Nothing particularly important, mind, but things like cleaning the house from top to bottom on Friday. Or holding Sunday dinner for all the various spread-out relatives in my parents’ house. Or…

It occurred to me today to wonder whether that’s part of the difference between first borns and second and subsequent children. I don’t know about you, but when we got married, we were making it up as we went along. I will say even now we’re not very good at falling into a routine, witness the fact we move every seven to eight years. But after we’ve been in the Front Range for almost 20 years, we’ve developed favorite places and places we do so and so at at such and such a time.

My first son probably still remembers when we were learning our way and making things up as we went along (possibly. He was born six years into our marriage) but to his brother these partake the way of imutable and sacred laws.

A lot of the certainties of my childhood seem to have been the same and my grandmother’s death, and my moving away by themselves changed a lot of them.

It makes me wonder about larger societal traditions and what I could romantically call “the memory of a people.” My sons, despite my explaining things, have picked up some funny notions about their ancestry and their ancestry’s habits from what I don’t say but do. And what I do is often dictated by circumstances that have long since ended.

I’m reminded of a story my host mother told me. There was a woman who had learned from her mother to prepare leg of lamb. She cut it in half lengthwise, put it in two separate baking dishes and cooked it according to what she thought was family tradition. One day her mom was visiting and the woman assured her she was still preparing leg of lamb the old way. As mom watched, she split the leg lengthwise and her mom said “What are you doing?” “Well, mom, I’m breaking the leg in half, as you always did.” To which the mom says, “But that’s only because I didn’t own a baking dish large ENOUGH.”

I wonder how many of the day to the day routines that become “the way we do things” are the result of not having dishes large enough. Which is why I like to reexamine things periodically, and make sure I haven’t become ossified. Even if it disturbs the children.

*crossposted at Classical Values*